The general plan of the author is to describe the condition of society and of the various degrees of men, much as in the latter portion of the Speculum Meditantis. This, however, is made subordinate to the detailed account, given at the beginning, of the Peasants’ rising, and that is in fact set down as the main subject of the work in the Latin account of it given by the author: ‘Secundus enim liber sermone Latino versibus exametri et pentametri compositus tractat super illo mirabili euentu, qui in Anglia tempore domini Regis Ricardi secundi anno regni sui quarto contigit, quando seruiles rustici impetuose contra nobiles et ingenuos regni insurrexerunt. Innocenciam tamen dicti domini Regis tunc minoris etatis causa inde excusabilem pronuncians, culpas aliunde, ex quibus et non a fortuna talia inter homines contingunt enormia, euidencius declarat. Titulusque voluminis huius, cuius ordo septem continet paginas, Vox Clamantis nominatur.’
So the statement of contents ran in its earlier form. Afterwards the excuses made for the king on the ground of his youth were withdrawn, and in the final form of the statement the events of the Cronica Tripertita are brought into the reckoning, and the fall of Richard seems to be represented as a moral consequence of the earlier misfortunes of his reign.
Evidently what is quoted above is a very insufficient summary of the Vox Clamantis, which in fact deals with the Peasants’ rising only in its first book; and notwithstanding the fact that this event so much overshadows the other subjects of the poem that the author in describing his work afterwards treated it as the only theme, there is some reason to question whether what we have is really the original form of the poem, and even to conclude that the work may have been originally composed altogether without this detailed narrative of the insurrection. For this idea there is some manuscript authority. It has not hitherto been noted that in one copy (MS. Laud 719) the Vox Clamantis appears with the omission of the whole of the first book after the Prologue and first chapter[66]. At the same time the text of this manuscript seems to be complete in itself, and the books are numbered in accordance with the omission, so that there are six books only, our second book being numbered as the first[67]. There is really something to be said for this arrangement, apart from the fact that it occurs in a single manuscript. The first book, with its detailed account of the Peasants’ revolt, though in itself the most interesting part of the work, has certainly something of the character of an insertion. The plan of the remainder seems to be independent of it, though the date, June, 1381, which is found also in the Laud MS.,
‘Contigit vt quarto Ricardi regis in anno,
Dum clamat mensem Iunius esse suum,’
was doubtless intended to suggest that portentous event as the occasion of the review of society which the work contains. The prologue of the second book, which introduces the teachings of the vision with an invocation of God’s assistance, an apology for the deficiencies of the work, and an appeal to the goodwill of the reader, and concludes with a first announcement of the name of the succeeding poem, Vox Clamantis, would certainly be much more in place at the beginning of the whole work than here, after more than two thousand lines, and there is no difficulty in supposing that the author may have introduced his account of the Peasants’ revolt as an afterthought. The chief reason for hesitating to accept the Laud MS. as representing an authentic form of the poem, lies in the fact that the text of this MS. is rather closely related to that of another copy, MS. Digby 138, which contains the first book in its usual place; and it is perhaps more likely that the original archetype of these two MSS. was one which included the first book, and that this was omitted for some reason by the scribe of the Laud MS., than that the copyist of the Digby MS. perceived the absence of this book and supplied it from some other quarter.
One other matter affecting our estimate of the style of the composition generally has perhaps been sufficiently illustrated in the Notes of this edition, that is to say, the extent to which the author borrows in the Vox Clamantis from other writers. It is sufficiently obvious to a casual reader that he has appropriated a good many lines from Ovid, though the extent of this schoolboy plagiarism is hardly to be realised without careful examination; but his very extensive obligations to other writers have not hitherto been pointed out. He repeatedly takes not lines or couplets only, but passages of eight, ten or even twenty lines from the Aurora of Peter Riga, from the poem of Alexander Neckam De Vita Monachorum, from the Speculum Stultorum, or from the Pantheon, so that in many places the composition is entirely made up of such borrowed matter variously arranged and combined. This is evidently a thing to be noted, because if the author, when describing (for example) the vices of monasteries, is found to be merely quoting from Alexander Neckam, we cannot attach much value to his account as a picture of the manners of his own time. His knowledge of Ovid seems to have been pretty complete, for he borrows from almost every section of his works with the air of one who knows perfectly well where to turn for what he wants; quite a large portion of Neckam’s poem is appropriated without the smallest acknowledgement, and many long passages are taken from the Aurora, with only one slight mention of this source (iii. 1853). Most of the good Latin lines for which Gower has got credit with critics are plagiarisms of this kind, and if Professor Morley had realized to what extent the Vox Clamantis is a compilation, he would hardly have estimated the work so highly as he has done. The extracts from medieval authors are to some extent tolerable, because they are usually given in a connected and intelligible shape, but the perpetual borrowing of isolated lines or couplets from Ovid, often without regard to their appropriateness or their original meaning, often makes the style, of the first book especially, nearly as bad as it can be. I have taken the pains to point out a considerable number of plagiarisms, but it is certain that there must be many instances which have escaped my notice. In his later Latin verse the author is very much less dependent upon others, and the Cronica Tripertita, from the nature of the subject, is necessarily original.
Gower’s own style of versification in Latin is somewhat less elegant than that of Alexander Neckam or Peter Riga, but it stands upon much the same level of correctness. If we take into account the fact that the Latin is not classical but medieval, and that certain licences of prosody were regularly admitted by medieval writers of Latin verse, we shall not find the performance very bad. Such licences are, for example, the lengthening of a short syllable at the caesura, the position of final short vowels before ‘st,’ ‘sp,’ ‘sc’ at the beginning of the succeeding word, and the use of polysyllabic words, or of two dissyllables, at the end of the hexameter, so that lines such as these are not to be taken as irregular:
‘Omnis et inde gradus a presule sanctificatus;’
‘Quo minor est culpa, si cadat inde rea;’